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UT duo collaborates on reflective publication

By Lindsay Mahaney : June 8th, 2016

“I guess I didn’t realize everybody’s kitchen didn’t sometimes smell like oil paint and turpentine, and that it was unusual that sometimes when you got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, your mom would be up at two in the morning painting,” Tim Sanderson reflected with a smile.

He cites his mother as a major influence for his interest in art.
“She would let you know if your art needed work, but she’d do it in a way that made you think, ‘Yeah, I can fix that.’”

“Schweinlebensraum” (“Living Space for Pigs as Pigs”), an original futuristic drawing by Tim Sanderson, was inspired by the counterfactual conjecture “If pigs could fly …” to accompany Dr. David Nemeth’s piece titled “Space, Time and Pig.”

Sanderson, college computing administrator, and Dr. David Nemeth, professor of geography, have worked collaboratively on several projects while at The University of Toledo — Nemeth writes, and Sanderson illustrates the sardonic works.

The pair most recently teamed up for their third collaborative piece; this one is about wild pigs. Nemeth explained that he examines what it would be like if pigs were free beings, rather than factory farmed for the sole purpose of being eaten.

“I took the popular idiom ‘If pigs could fly,’ which would mean something is totally impossible,” he said. “And yet, pigs can fly through technology and science, with planes and such. So, I’m thinking perhaps they can fly above their conditions of pigs as pork, and become pigs as pigs again.”

Sanderson recalled when Nemeth reached out to him about his most recent work: “When I asked what he needed me to draw, he said he wanted a post-modern, flying pig, and I told him I wasn’t even sure what that means.”

But Nemeth liked what Sanderson came up with, and the flying pig was included.

“The University is a real intellectual community, which is what a university is supposed to be,” Nemeth said. “It’d be great if we could make this a real collaborative, creative community.”

“Space, Time and Pig” will be published in Ecology, Conservation and Management of Wild Pigs and Peccaries (Cambridge University Press) later this year.